l exercise
control, which among men and women have been outgrown. This is
illustrated in popular games and songs which children have orally
preserved; and the same is true of their superstitions. Women,
especially, who may peruse this collection will be surprised to find how
many of the items here recorded will seem familiar, and at the same time
to have received credence; in the case of a particularly clear-minded
person, free from any disposition toward credulity, nearly a hundred of
these superstitions were remembered. The ideas in question, perhaps at no
time more than half believed, have frequently altogether faded into
oblivion.

Attention should be paid, also, to the imaginative power of the youthful
mind, and the manner in which beliefs are visualized, and appear as
realities of perception. To illustrate this principle have been included
a few examples belonging rather to individual than to general opinion.
The little girl who without any direct instruction imagines that the
light of the heaven gleams through the orifices we call stars, who sees
celestial beings in meteor form winging their way across the skies, or
who is surrounded by the benevolent spirits which her discriminating
education, banishing the terrors of the supernatural world, has permitted
to exist for her comprehension, illustrates that readiness of fancy and
control of vision by expectation which belongs to humanity in the reverse
degree of the reflective habit. Herein childish conceptions and vivacity
of feeling represent the human faculty which education may control but
cannot obliterate.

Beliefs relating to the influence of physiognomy present us with a very
limited anthology of popular ideas, which in elaborate developments have
been expanded into pseudo-sciences, and fill whole libraries of learned
misinformation. These notions may be divided into two classes. On the one
hand appear indications founded on natural analogies, as when we still
speak of close-fistedness. On the other side, many of these associations
are arbitrary, as when the study of spots on the nails is supposed to
give means for determining future fortune. Such conclusions depend partly
on the correct opinion that in the cradle lies the future man, with all
elements of his complex nature, and partly on external marks, the
interpretation of which is purely arbitrary.

The chapter on "Projects" presents the reader with a class of usages,
sufficiently foolish when conside